A Little Knitting, A Little Celebrating, A Little Cooking

The Chicks little fingers have been busy as bees lately. We cranked out four more ponchos and a few more are in the works, as we speak.

The pink poncho on the left was made by Elaine, using a worsted weight cotton yarn. The brown one on the right was one of mine, using a DK weight, also cotton yarn.

Liz made the left blue poncho, using an acrylic yarn and Barbara made the blue striped poncho on the right using an acrylic/wool blend yarn.
In between time, when I was feeling a little bored with the poncho, I made this cute newborn sweater out of sock weight yarn. This will go into our inventory for a future donation. Believe it or not, this sweater started with three stitches! With carefully placed increases, it grows into a jacket which requires only two short seams to be sewn, making it almost fully assembled by the time you finish knitting.
Now onto the celebrating portion of today's entry....DH and I celebrated 32 years of wedded bliss last Thursday, July 9th. My husband loves to research where we will celebrate each anniversary dinner by choosing a restaurant where we have never eaten before. For the most part we have been very lucky with delicious meals. This year was one of our few "Five Star Winners" with the scenery being almost as great as the meal. "Michael's On the Hill" in Waterbury Center, Vermont ( http://www.michaelsonthehill.com/press.shtml) is a chef owned restaurant which won Michael Kloeti the first Vermont's Chef of the Year award. And he earned every bit of this award! Our meal was outstanding in taste and presentation and the service was excellent from the time we entered and the hostess remembered to wish us a happy anniversary, to the beautifully arranged dishes adorned with edible flowers. We even enjoyed the sunshine at our table, which after so many weeks of rain, was a welcome sight.
On Friday we drove up to Essex, Vermont to have some more fun. We stopped at Kaleidoscope Yarns ( http://www.kyarns.com/ ) in Essex Junction so I could enjoy some fiber shopping. And look! The sun is still going strong!

This is a little shop with a big heart! And lots of yarn goodies too!

Then we went to The Essex (http://www.vtculinaryresort.com/) to enjoy last year's Christmas present. DH bought me an afternoon with a lesson from one of the chefs from the New England Culinary Institute.

The resort is lovely and everywhere you turn down a hall or through the lobby, it is decorated with beautiful or whimsical cakes and photographs of food.

This cake had four different sides with trout swimming upstream to a vineyard with a wine cellar.

Soooooo cute!

These next two cakes were just outside one of the dining rooms.

I don't think I could cut into anything this pretty.

At 3:30PM our cooking lesson began. DH and I were in a class of seven, two husbands and the rest were women. Our chef instructor was Chef Courtney Contos and her assitant was Chef Kerri Bouffard. They were both so congenial and remembered all our names on the first try! How cool is that?!

Chef Courtney was explaining the Spanish Fiesta Tapas dinner we were going to prepare. We started out with Bacon wrapped dates, drizzled with Pomegranate Molasses, then moved on to Seared Diver Scallops with a Romesco Sauce, which is like a pesto only with almonds and roasted red peppers. The Goat cheese baked in Tomato Sauce with fresh basil was such a simple dish to prepare but it tasted like it required an expert. The next dish was Traditional Garlic Shrimp with a parsley butter sauce and with it all the most yummy whole grain country bread. Dessert was a small square of an orange/lemon cake topped with freshly whipped cream and a raspberry. By that time we all could hardly fit anything else. But everything was delicious!

Everyone in the class could participate as much or as little as they wanted.

If any of you know Ron or me you can imagine how we were itching to get our hands working!

After a few glasses of homemade Sangria it was time to put down the knives, back away from the fire, and finally taste the fruits of our labor.

We thoroughly enjoyed this experience and I'm now trying to convince Ron that we should make this cooking class an annual Christmas tradition.